Switching to reusable bags for groceries?

@WilliamHenry,

The county I live in (Multnomah) in Oregon banned plastic bags so most people use reusable bags or the store's (compostable) paper bags. Many of our neighboring counties still allow plastic bags though, so the impact has been negligible.

For a brief time stores handed out 3 reusable bags to every customer that had one of their loyalty cards. Now you have to buy them for $1.00.

If you want to look at an area that has a variety of laws regarding shopping bags look at Portland, Oregon. Three counties comprise the metropolitan area (Washington, Multnomah, Clackamas) and the laws vary from county to county. In fact, you can cross the street in some areas and encounter different laws.

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@boomerang,

I bought a couple of nylon bags from one of the grocery stores we shop at. The problem is I always forget to put them back in the car so I can use them again.

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@jcboy,

We've been paying for plastic bags for a few years here now, and they will be completely banned as of January. I've been using reusables at least some of the time for about 40 years - I like them.

jcboy - put together a stash of about a dozen - keep half of them in the car all of the time - just switch them out - if you bring 3 full ones in, take 3 empty ones out. Once you get into the routine it's not hard.

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@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

I've been using reusables at least some of the time for about 40 years - I like them.

probably about 30+ for us

[/quote]put together a stash of about a dozen - keep half of them in the car all of the time - just switch them out - if you bring 3 full ones in, take 3 empty ones out. Once you get into the routine it's not hard. [/quote]

that's our strategy

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@ehBeth,

I do need more then just two. That’s why I always forget them. After carrying the groceries in the house and putting them away you don’t take the bags back out to the car.

I’ll need to pick up a few more next time I'm out shopping.

1 Reply

@jcboy,

I've probably got at least 30 of the bags stashed in various spots. I tend to refold and bundle them in groups of 10 or so every now and then. I get most of mine free at various trade shows - 1 trade show is usually good for at least 4 or 5 good reusable bags.

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@ehBeth,

We keep ours near the front door. This strategy works except last year, my folks came up. They had some of their stuff packed in similar-looking bags. When they left, our bags were gone.

Yes, my father had accidentally packed our (empty) reusable bags.

He mailed them back.

Now we put them in the back seat of our car whenever they visit (we take their car whenever we go anywhere during one of their visits as the driveway is straight so it blocks our vehicle.

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@WilliamHenry,

Hello Friends,

They already do this in Europe, but the customer has to purchase the bags and plastic bags have to be purchased as well. Nothing is free there. Shopping cart 50 cents, trip to the restroom 30 cents, plastic bags 10 cents.

Thanks and Regards
Michael Bevan

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EVERYBODY gives out tote bags, free, any time they can find an excuse. It's the green thing to do. I've got half a dozen Ford Red Sox tote bags from a giveaway at Fenway Park to the first ten thousand people. I've got tote bags from two different banks, one of them insulated, neither of them from my bank. I've got four or five from the Strand Bookstore in NYC, you get one free at Xmas with every $25 purchase. A couple from my local Star Market with a cute polar bear photo on them for 99 cents. Problem is, I live three blocks from the grocery, so leaving a stash in the car doesn't help, because I don't drive there. And I never remember them when I leave the house. In MA, I think it's a law that if you give out plastic bags, you have to have something to recycle them in, so every time I accumulate a large Halloween-pumpkin-sized wad of them, I take them back and leave them in the recycling barrel.

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I've got about 30 bags, too. I hang them on my front door handle so I remember to take them back to the car, but I have a reusable bag full of reusable bags in my trunk, as well, and some in my back seat.

At one of our grocery stores, there's a bin full of used plastic bags - I take some of those for my small garbage cans in the house.

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@WilliamHenry,

In order to keep the city clean its better to rely on reusable nylon bags. I use them.

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If we reuse our bag while buying groceries then we can save some amount of money. While some stores still offer free plastic bags, most now charge around five cents per bag

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@robertsmith314,

we no have a lot of these AMish "bulk tores" where they have these dispensary gizmos that shoot cereal, grain, pasta etc into a container that you bring. I get my raisin bran this way.

Our townhip u to collct recyclables and they no longer accept plastic bottles or bags or clamshell containers.

ere sorta goin back to glass Pepsi bottles or Aluminum cans (of which there IS a robust market for recycling)

Quote:

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@jcboy,

jcboy wrote:

The problem is I always forget to put them back in the car so I can use them again.

I'm surprised no one has implemented a deposit system for re-usable bags, like those for cans and bottles in some areas.

If you had to pay $1 for a re-usable bag, but you could get, say, $0.25 back as a deposit, then people who forget their bags will eventually bring back all their bags to collect their deposit, and then those bags can be resold.

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@WilliamHenry,

2% of recyclables are recycled - 98% is shipped to Asia to rot.

Reason (Can prove)
Govt pays local (UK) recycling plant (1 of) 50% of subsidy (EU) to reprocess.
Govt pays 100% subsidy to ship-out.

So - Recycle here - Earn 50% - Ship-out - Earn 100%.

You are up-to-date with this?
No.
Wanna link?

Btw - Is global.

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Quote:

In a 2018 life-cycle assessment, Denmark's ministry of environment and food agreed with previous similar studies, finding that classic plastic shopping bags have the least environmental impact. This assessment does not take marine litter into account--so as far as that gigantic problem is concerned, plastics are almost certainly the worst, since they don't break down on a timescale meaningful to human or animal life.

But when taking into account other factors, like the impact of manufacturing on climate change, ozone depletion, water use, air pollution, and human toxicity, those classic, plastic shopping bags are actually the most benign of the current common options.

The technical name for the wispy plastic bags, like the ones you might get at the grocery store or deli, are low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags.

The table below, using data from the Denmark study, compares the environmental performance of LDPE bags to other bags, assuming that the LDPE bags are reused once as a trash bin liner before being incinerated (incineration is the best possible disposal for these bags, according to the report).

Cotton bags must be reused thousands of times before they meet the environmental performance of plastic bags--and, the Denmark researchers write, organic cotton is worse than conventional cotton when it comes to overall environmental impact. According to the report, organic cotton bags have to be reused many more times than conventional cotton bags (20,000 versus 7,000 times), based on the assumption that organic cotton has a 30% lower yield rate on average than conventional cotton, and therefore was assumed to require 30% more resources, like water, to grow the same amount.

http://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotton-totes-might-be-worse-than-plastic/

1 Reply

@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

Quote:
In a 2018 life-cycle assessment, Denmark's ministry of environment and food agreed with previous similar studies, finding that classic plastic shopping bags have the least environmental impact. This assessment does not take marine litter into account--so as far as that gigantic problem is concerned, plastics are almost certainly the worst, since they don't break down on a timescale meaningful to human or animal life.

But when taking into account other factors, like the impact of manufacturing on climate change, ozone depletion, water use, air pollution, and human toxicity, those classic, plastic shopping bags are actually the most benign of the current common options.

The technical name for the wispy plastic bags, like the ones you might get at the grocery store or deli, are low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags.

The table below, using data from the Denmark study, compares the environmental performance of LDPE bags to other bags, assuming that the LDPE bags are reused once as a trash bin liner before being incinerated (incineration is the best possible disposal for these bags, according to the report).

Cotton bags must be reused thousands of times before they meet the environmental performance of plastic bags--and, the Denmark researchers write, organic cotton is worse than conventional cotton when it comes to overall environmental impact. According to the report, organic cotton bags have to be reused many more times than conventional cotton bags (20,000 versus 7,000 times), based on the assumption that organic cotton has a 30% lower yield rate on average than conventional cotton, and therefore was assumed to require 30% more resources, like water, to grow the same amount.

http://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotton-totes-might-be-worse-than-plastic/

Plastic bag bans are also bad for the environment when you consider that light-weight waterproof plastic bags are the best for people who have to carry them by hand or bicycle, because they don't drive. Driving, even electric vehicles, is the major cause of deforestation due to sprawl-development and over-pavement of soil that could otherwise support tree roots and other plant/animal life that absorb atmospheric carbon and provide watershed functions.

If more people used transit or rode bicycles to do shopping, the sustainability benefits would be worth the small amount of plastic used to keep grocery bags light-weight for carrying and waterproof to protect from rain.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Plastic food is less than nutritional , too.
Eaten any, lately?

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Switching to reusable bags for groceries?

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